Joint Routing and Stream Control Scheduling in MIMO-Based WMNs

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) have emerged as a cost effective and promising technology to provide broadband connectivity in several environments. In this work, we consider a cross layer optimal design of routing, medium access control (MAC) scheduling, and physical layer resource allocation for WMNs, where nodes are equipped with Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) antennas. MIMO antennas can greatly improves the throughput by transmitting multiple independent data streams and/or suppressing the interference from neighboring links. To address the MAC and stream control at the physical layer, we consider the notion of Transmission Configurations (TCs). By incorporating the TCs in the cross-layer design, we formulate a Joint Routing and Stream Control Scheduling (JRSCS) problem as a linear program (LP), with the objective of finding a minimum length schedule that satisfies the traffic demand of a set of end-to-end sessions. A column generation based method is proposed to solve the JRSCS problem. The simulation results are presented to verify the performance of the scheme. We have also evaluated the impact of the physical layer capabilities such as number of antennas, single and multi-user radios on the scheduling time of the network.